The Road To Baghdad

David Simon’s “Generation Kill.”

A Marine battalion heads for Baghdad in the early days of the war.Credit Illustration by Lorenzo Mattotti

“Generation Kill,” a new miniseries on HBO, is based on a 2004 book by Evan Wright, which is an expanded version of a three-part series that was published in Rolling Stone, in 2003, about the time Wright spent embedded with a Marine battalion in Iraq. It’s not necessarily the case that a heart beats less robustly when it’s transplanted, but Wright’s creation has become more attenuated with each step it has taken—from magazine article to book to TV miniseries. For one thing, although the title of the magazine series, “The Killer Elite,” may not be especially original, it’s more piquant, because of its very accuracy, than “Generation Kill,” which is Wright’s attempt to coin a phrase that plays off “the greatest generation.” Wright had the good fortune—reportorially speaking—to be in Iraq from the beginning of the invasion, so he was well situated to observe how the war unfolded and how the men he was ensconced with did, or didn’t, change as a result. His articles, which end shortly after the Marines entered Baghdad, appeared just a few months after the invasion and had an organic immediacy—although Wright wrote them after returning home to the States, you could imagine him sitting in the desert ripping pages out of a manual typewriter and sending them off with a courier. The third paragraph of the Rolling Stone series starts in classic field-dispatch fashion: “The war began twenty-four hours ago.” The third paragraph of the book starts with a yawn: “Their war began several days ago.” The magazine pieces are punchy; in the book, the tone has been neutralized and the author’s voice is not nearly as present. Fatally, it is entirely missing from the miniseries.

“Generation Kill,” which airs in what I’ll always think of as the “Sopranos” time slot—Sundays at nine—was created by David Simon, whose HBO series “The Wire” recently finished its fifth and final season. (That show also ran in Tony’s time slot.) “The Wire” could have been called “The Web”—each season involved a different element of life in Baltimore (the drug trade, the waterfront, the city bureaucracy, the educational system, and the press), creating, over all, an intricate picture of the way things work, and don’t work, in that city. It’s possible that if Simon had used “Generation Kill” not as a blueprint but as a jumping-off point he might have come up with something richer than he did. (The series was written by Simon, Ed Burns—Simon’s collaborator on “The Wire”—and Wright.)

Actually, it’s a little surprising that Simon went for this material at all. If you watched TV during the first two weeks of the war, you’ll remember that it was covered exhaustively and enthusiastically, as if it were a hot, sandy pep rally. Troop movements, weather conditions, equipment, terminology, and geography—reporters practically got drunk on it all, egged on, presumably, by the networks, some of which sported American-flag graphics during their war coverage. However you judge the response of American news organizations during the early days of the war, they certainly made those days vivid to viewers, and they helped us understand the terrible significance of the resistance the Marines faced in southern Iraq as they made their way from Kuwait to Baghdad. Wright’s pieces, coming out so soon after the invasion, brought the same kind of reality home—even more so, since he had greater control over his narrative than the TV reporters did: they were literally blown about by the wind while they were on camera and sometimes were made almost invisible by all-encompassing sandstorms. But that unforgettable time was more than five years ago, and I don’t see anything to be gained by retracing the path from Kuwait to Baghdad. Tell us, as they say, something we don’t know.

On the other hand, there would certainly be room right now for a drama about the war that emphasized ideas as well as trying to describe the experience, one that went further up the chain of command to the real decision-makers. But “Generation Kill” is lose-lose in that regard: it has too many characters for the writers to be able to do more than create thumbnail sketches, and it seems convinced that verisimilitude and earnest believability—simple accretion of “slice of life” detail—will add up to drama and watchability. One of the marines in the First Reconnaissance Battalion, with whom Wright travelled, Sergeant Rudy Reyes—who has Hollywood good looks and, indeed, plays himself in the miniseries—told NPR that the show sticks closely to the book. “They don’t dramatize nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing more dramatic going on than a unit of recon marines with no close air support or armor running and gunning into insurgents that are holed up in towns and fighting to the death.” And what’s never acknowledged in the series is the fact that what we’re seeing is only one writer’s reality. The writer onscreen (played by Lee Tergesen) is never named—the men in the platoon call him “Reporter” or “Writer” or nothing—and he’s rarely on camera. Only occasionally is he embedded in the actual drama. One is to some extent grateful for that. Wright doesn’t get in the way in the book, either, and you feel that he’s intelligent and has a good eye. But the writer in the series is a nearly mute cipher; I suppose his dullness is meant to indicate that he’s a decent sort and a true professional, and not a representative of the hated media.

There is very little in “Generation Kill” to distinguish it from other war-is-hell dramas, such as Steven Bochco’s 2005 series “Over There”—though civilians never cease to be surprised by the facts of military life. In the case of “Generation Kill,” that glaring fact is that First Recon’s mission is one that its men aren’t trained for. An élite group of marines whipped into spectacular physical shape, whose function is to scramble stealthily ahead of regular troops and scout the enemy’s positions behind the lines, they are asked to drive north to Baghdad in a convoy of Humvees, like sitting ducks. But to a man they’re all up for it; some of them, in fact, are frustrated and angry when, at times, they receive orders not to shoot.

If we got to know any of the characters in “Generation Kill,” the show might be more interesting, or, at least, more memorable. But only a few accidental distinctions set them apart: a raspy voice in one case (an officer who had throat cancer), hair and skin color in others. Some talk more than others. It’s clear that the laconic Sergeant Brad Colbert (Alexander Skarsgård), the leader of the team that Wright chooses to ride with, is the hero of the piece, because the camera stays on his face to record his every reaction, which is almost always a smile of some kind—rueful, encouraging, conspiratorial, wise, depending on whom he’s trying to placate at the time. The smile is an all-purpose, strong-silent-type reaction into which we can read anything, and which substitutes for clarity, psychological or otherwise. At the start of the war, it was useful to be reminded of what was involved in being a soldier, but at this remove such a “faithful” depiction comes across as an abdication, a moral failure to judge and to acknowledge the horrors that followed—it makes the war in Iraq feel like little more than an adventure story with a few unpleasant wrinkles and an occasional nod to the ethical dilemmas and battlefield difficulties unique to this conflict. The show doesn’t shy away from portraying certain absurdities and outrages—a lot is made of the fact that one officer is obsessed with the width of some of the platoon members’ mustaches, and, at the other end of the scale, you see civilian casualties and marines carrying out various levels of abuse, including one officer who repeatedly jabs his bayonet into the ground next to a prisoner’s head. But one of the most sickening episodes in the book is whitewashed in the series. In the book, as a marine reaches into a car that’s been riddled with bullets to pick up a little girl, “the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out”; in the series, the girl is dead, but intact. In a show like this, if you’re going to get real, you have to go all the way. ♦